上个月车子到了两年一次的年检，相关部门的短信提醒早早就发到了手机上，上面写明了检验的地点和联系电话。不像交养路费，滞纳金照收，提醒是没有的。

在网上看关于年检的信息，基本上就一个结论：去了就准备好挨宰。-- 或许这也是为什么短信提醒这么勤快 -- 我想。没想过了两天又收到一条短信，告诉我可以在就近的检测站验车，同样写明了地址和联系电话。

这个地址貌似比较近点，于是就抽了个平时的时间，下午三点半开到那里（据说趁下午过去，他们快下班了就没什么心思整你，可以顺利一点）。本以为大门口会有拉生意代验的，结果发现静悄悄，验车的人也不多，开进去把车子停好，交钱，交钥匙，然后就是等着。等候区弄了几排沙发一个电视机，还挺周到。大概等了一刻钟，就听到叫自己的车牌号，于是再次交钱，换证，结束。

还好，还好，没想象的复杂。

A little while back I asked this question on Twitter. I was interested in how other people’s first experiences with PHP compared with my own. I got some great responses - from funny to completely honest. Here’s the list:

• Skoop: I didn’t choose PHP, PHP chose me (nice, very zen.)
• Andriess: low entry barrier, and the AWESOME community
• Felixdv: great community, open-source spirit and low barrier but powerful if needed (as of PHP5 )
• DragonBe: in PHP I found my likings, where as Perl left me hanging about..
• Rmehner: Mainly because of deployment issues in the beginning. PHP was everywhere available. (In the beginning I had often web projects)
• lvtrll: The options at the time were PHP or ASP… which would you choose? =P
• ijansch: it was the logical choice (or, ......

我们到的时候，Ivar Jacobson 正好开讲，演讲的内容可能很精彩，那个 PPT 说实话真是挺一般。我倒是直接被现场的 叽歪 互动大屏幕吸引住了，巧的是，叽歪 的展台上座位空着，我就不客气的霸占了。折腾了半天，才把笔记本的无线硬开关打开，然后抢了半天信号。发出了第一句消息。

没想到这一发就不可收拾，信号越是抢不到，越是想抢。上午刚开始的时候大屏幕显示的消息基本上是报道消息和广告消息。到了 SAP 芮祥麟 和接下来的庞升东演讲的时候，大屏幕上的互动明显更活跃了。可见这两位演讲水平其实...芮 居然跑这里来谈什么 80/20 法则，而庞的 PPT 也太粗糙了一点。倒是 Google 的那位用几幅图蒙了不少人。毕竟好图值千言。不过也有眼尖的朋友说 "张先生还没有使用 chrome"。这时候现场抱怨无线信号不好的人越来越多(1, 2008-09-06 23:41:05 | 全文 | 评论(0)

A Breadcrumb trail is a great tool for site navigation and provides a simple menu for users to find their back up the hierachy to Home. This method alleviates a lot of complex menu creation when navigation is left to a single menu system. The easy to follow path of a breadcrumb is very user friendly and SEO friendly for those who like to push their page rank.

The PHP file_exists() function provides a method of checking if a file exists at a given path. This function extends this functionality to check if a file exists anywhere within a provided directory recursively. This means the file may be within any sub directory also and still be found.

In January of 2008 SUN Microsystems announced its intention to purchase MySQL. This announcement was met with mixed reactions with some seeing this as a positive move and reason to migrate to MySQL while others saw it as a threat to the Open Source movement and migrated to other databases. With a little number crunching some anecdotal evidence can be gained to see how adoption levels have changed since that time.

The GD graphics library that is bundled with PHP provides many functions to enable image manipulation from within PHP. The most commonly requested task is thumbnailing images. This script shows a simple method to use GD to thumbnail an image and save it to disc.

Seperating the individual images in an animated gif with PHP has never been easier than now with the Imagick extension. The Imagick extension allows a vast array of functionality with image manipulation. Here an animated gif is iterated over frame by frame and each frame is resized and thumbnailed. Note the use of writeImages() instead of writeImage(). A handy trick when needing to thumbnail an animated gif

This tutorial aims to introduce the new PHP coder to some of the more common PHP functions that are used in application development. The code base creates a PHP Blog, complete with a user system and introduces basic user access and CRUD. The tutorial uses no Object Oriented code in a bid to highlight the use of PHP functions and their usage in real world situations. A complete working download is provided and can be skinned with CSS for those who simply require a blog.

PHP contains a robust feature set of error handling mechanisms such as E_WARNING, E_STRICT, E_ALL etc. Often these errors pop up unexpectedly at run time and should be handled correctly. This function provides a method of handling runtime errors as exceptions.

A recent surge in the number of developers willing to work on PHP database extension and PDO means great changes ahead for the database extensions and for the future of PDO. Leading the push with the PDO-MySQLnd driver is SUN/MySQL who have provide much code and testing to get the PHP extension up to speed.

This simple and easy to use class has a single purpose, to fetch the zodiac star sign of a given month and day. Great for anybody wishing to display astrological data on a website

This simple class calculates Body Mass Index from given height and weight variables. The class can take measurements in imperial or metric and will return a numeric index and also where that index falls on scale ranging from underweight to obese.

I’m not quite sure when I was dropped from Planet PHP. I haven’t been there in a long time and certainly haven’t posted on there for a long time, so it is no surprise. I think it is nice actually. I said what I wanted to say and I don’t think I have anything else to say about PHP, well at least not for a while.

The reason I joined in the first place was that there weren’t that many posts that I wanted to read. Now, there are more than enough posts that I want to read and also need to read. Many and better bloggers on PHP have joined the Planet PHP site, so I am not needed. It was fun and I’m glad they allowed me to join the community, but I’m happy being pushed aside and replaced by far better people.

I started visiting the site again and well, I enjoy it once more. I’m visiting the site more and more, so my addiction to PHP news is coming back. It is a safe drug I can get used to. I’m still addicted to WordPress news, but a ......

As I said in my last post we are not yet sure if we need to make some changes to namespaces before we can move from alpha to beta in the current 5.3.0 release cycle. What I did not ask for explicitly is feedback from people that have already started developing code with namespaces. These people are likely the best source of feedback on the current state of namespaces and if the proposed changes to namespaces would be useful or not. As you can see in the thread on internals around this RFC Stas does not feel its necessary, while Marcus still feels its a good idea.

I know that the Doctrine guys are already playing with namespaces and are preparing to move to requiring 5.3.0 in trunk (which will ......